Once seams are ready, the needle lifting is followed by a translation of the transversal lever, which pushes towards the outside the belt with the relevant carrier(s) and the buckle suitably connected by a seam, until the belt engages with a hooking fork integral with a longitudinal dragging device. Once hooked, the sewn and completed belt is longitudinally dragged until the above seams are positioned on special means for the removal of the protruding thread residues, after which it is unloaded into underlying aligned containers.
The whole is carried out automatically, through cycles planned and temporized according to the type of belt, the number and type of carriers, the type of buckle, the type of sewing-thread. The procedures utilized by the known art for connecting buckles and carriers to belts require a pre-positioning of said details and a subsequent hand intervention which aligns, as much as possible, the belts to the heads of the sewing machine, as well as the keeping of their correct positioning during the sewing operation. It is therefore obvious that such workings are only entrusted to the capability and the experience of the operators and that the final results are not uniform and homogeneous.
Besides, after the sewing, belts have to be hand extracted from beneath the operating heads, and sent on, always by hand, to the subsequent finishing stages, including the cutting of the protruding thread residues and the stacking in the containers for the collection and/or manufacturing.
Such operations are time-consuming, require much manpower and space, are substantially uneconomical and do not contribute to the necessary and wished production increases.